Their world as they know it will come to an end

Everyone loves a good Apocalyptic Prediction. A good Apocalyptic Prediction can only be trumped by an even better Conspiracy Theory. I do not claim to know when the world will end or who shot JFK, but one thing I can predict with certainty is that at 00:00.01 tomorrow morning the Mayan Era will come to an end and along with it the industry built around the fact that their calendar ends today.

Museums will pack away their Mayan exhibits and look for something else to lure visitors. Apocalyptic Predictors will be looking for the next big thing and Conspiracy Theorists will crawl out of the woodwork in the hope that their crackpot theory will become the next big Internet thing. And there we have it. The whole Mayan Calendar Myth could not have happened without the power of the Internet.

In general people believe implicitly in anything they read on the Internet. The mantra "I read it on the Internet it must be true" has replaced "I read it in the newspaper it must be true". Unfortunately neither of these mantras is true anymore. One only has to have an email account or a Facebook page to receive the biggest load of drivel on a daily basis.

The sad thing is that the drivel circulated in this way is passed on by believing recipients ensuring that the message gets to a massive amount of people. Even if the information is palpably untrue it is passed on willy nilly without any recourse to fact checking sites like Snopes or Hoaxslayer. I don't think we need to agonise why people are so gullible.

Usually the message feeds readers closely held beliefs. These beliefs might be political, religious, sexual or just about anything you can think about. If the message is powerful enough it is amazing how quickly it circulates.

Yesterday a story started to circulate on Facebook that children had been abducted from various malls in South Africa. This story gained credibility with detailed descriptions of events down to a young mite who was found by mall security in one of the toilets having already been changed into new clothes and had her hair cut by the perpetrators. The more detailed the information is it seems the more likely it is to be believed.

Thankfully this rumour was soon squashed, but I would not be surprised if it surfaces again over the next few days. This was a perfect Internet rumour. It dials into South African's fear of crime. It had a feel of credibility. People were commenting that it could be true because the malls were extremely busy with pre Christmas shoppers. There was lots of scary detail. Even those that were saying that it might be a hoax because there was nothing on the news sites were still hesitant to condemn it outright.

Despite many of these things being proven as hoaxes people still leap onto the bandwagon to repeat these stories. A friend of mine regularly sends me this sort of stuff. I have often debunked his stories by quoting from or sending him links to Snopes.com. Despite this he still sends on stuff without checking its veracity. The problem is obviously that we so want to believe this crap that we will avoid the truth from getting in the way of a good story.